Darren Stanley is Assistant Professor of Elementary Education (Mathematics) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. He received his doctorate form the University of Alberta, and his research interests include the study of complex phenomena as a paradigm for understanding and framing aspects of health and healthy learning organizations, including healthy schools. Additionally, he is interested in the circulation of lived phenomena with complexity frameworks. As a teacher educator in the faculty’s pre-service education program, he is interested in the ways in which pre-service teachers enact complexified understandings of mathematics and pedagogy.

Comparative Dynamics: Healthy Collectivities and the Pattern Which Connects

Darren Stanley

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the notion of “comparative dynamics” and the importance of connectivity as an essential and vital underlying principle for healthy collectivities. Such a notion resonates with Gregory Bateson’s idea of the “pattern which connects,” suggesting not only the functional importance of connectivity as an aspect of a healthy organization at some given scale, but also connectivity as an important principle, which is the basis for how all living patterns are connected together. This paper ends with some reflections on why and how teachers experience stress and burnout as an absence of connectivity while highlighting its importance in the well-being of teachers in healthy learning organizations.